Porto

Porto is the second largest city in Portugal and it’s defined as the “North Capital” of Portugal. The historic center is an Unesco World Heritage Site and home to the internationally known, Port Wine.

Last summer on our vacations, we decided to stay in Porto for two days before going to Lisbon. The flights are cheaper to Porto, near our home and we were very curious to visit this city.

We were absolutely amazing about the city. It has a very unique culture and you can see that by the city architecture. I love that the city near the river is not flat, it makes the houses looking like steps. The buildings are not as well preserved as in Lisbon but I think that gives a very charming feeling to the city. People are really friendly and you are always welcome wherever you go. There are so many beautiful places to visit and I will definitely go back there.

“Sweet Dreams”, Porto – Behind the Scenes

This shot was taken, on what is on my opinion, the best spot in Porto. Serra do Pilar Church (Igreja da Serra do Pilar) is located on the other city of the Douro river and it’s actually in Vila Nova de Gaia and not Porto. From here, specially at sunset, you have an awesome cityscape view and you can see the historic center, the Dom Luis I Bridge and the Clérigos Church Tower, just to name a few.

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For this shot, I merged five photos, before, during and after sunset.

This first shot, was still before the sun set down and it was used because of the sun light on the buildings. If you see the next photos, the city is pretty dark. You can see that the sky is really bright, because of the light differences between the sky and city.

A little bit later, the sun was lower on the horizon and I used this shot for the sky. With some masking and a lot of work, I merged this sky with the photo above.

On this shot, I used some of the lights , that are not so bright on this shot as on the next ones.

Here on this shot, I merged the water from the river and some other lights of the city.

On this shot, I merged the beautiful car light trails that you see on the bridge, below.

The photo after all of the merging in Photoshop, looked like this.

After some color and contrast corrections, sharpening and noise correction, the final shot is this.

This shot was a little bit tricky to process. The city was really dark, after the sun set low, because the sun sets behind the buildings. As you can see the historic center is really low near the river and it’s going up. This is really beautiful, as creates some layers on the cityscape but the buildings that are higher, block the sunlight to the lower buildings.

Did you already visited Porto? Did you went to this spot? Let me know on the comments section below!